Push email specialist emoze seems to be improving in all areas. Their free push service has just been extended to anyone with any POP3 account (i.e. no GMail or Exchange needed). And, unlike the GMail dedicated client, this one's native Symbian OS, so it's faster and leaner. Well worth checking out if you've been lusting after push email but didn't know how to get started.

I'm a little confused what advantage this 'push email' has over imap using the built in messaging client. As far as I can tell, I get my email messages delivered as soon as they arrive at my isp (fastmail).

I'm also receiving emails 'pushed' from GMail to my 9500's built-in messaging client, without the need for any additional software. In fact, it usually arrives to my communicator before it appears on the desktop version of GMail.

It depends which handset you're using, but I seem to remember the N95 supporting Imap Idle - which is the same mechanism that the iPhone uses for push email. Gmail supports the Imap Idle standard, as do a large number of mail servers. So that's probably what's happening.

But if your mail client doesn't support Imap Idle, you're going to need some other way of doing "push".

I wonder if the advantage with these 'push' email solutions (over the built in one, at least) is that the email message itself is pushed to the phone without you having to do anything. This is essentially adding an MTA on the phone, instead of just a MUA (I think those are the correct terms).

With my E90's email client using IMAP, I get a relatively instant notification of the arrival of an email and a message header ('from', 'subject', etc) is added to the list of messages, but message bodies themselves are only downloaded when I click on a message. If I've lost network connectivity in the meantime, it's too late and I have to wait until I get access again.

On the other hand, this seems to be a feature of the email client s/w rather than anything inherent with IMAP (or even POP) - my desktop's Thunderbird can configured to download the whole message; so perhaps I'm missing the setting somewhere....

The differences between push and POP (no pun intended) with a short polling interval that I can see are :

1) polling a POP (or IMAP[1]) server every 5 minutes puts a strain on the server and so increases the demands on your service provider (therefore increases costs/etc)
2) there is a delay between a message arriving and you knowing about it (5 minutes)

Max.

[1] My IMAP service provider (fastmail.fm) supports the IDLE command and recommends setting the server to check every 28 minutes since they've set it to disconnect after 30 minutes of IDLE :

http://www.fastmail.fm/docs/imap/thunderbird.htm
"You will get instant notifications of new mail since Thunderbird supports the IDLE command, however you should set this interval to just under 30 (say 28 for example) minutes since Fastmails IMAP server will disconnect you after 30 minutes with no activity. Checking for mail just prior to this timeout will prevent disconnections."

I can change my pop3 polling time down to 1 minute, some clients can do less. It can download the header or the whole message and it makes a noise on arrival.

Depending on the route, 1 minute is a good deal less than some email can take to traverse an IP route, particularly if the sending service has some kind of queued message content monitoring going on.

I do completely understand the advantage of push when it comes to server utilisation, placing the burden of the listener at the client end will obviously take work away from the server.

So, the advantage of push email is mostly to the provider, and in the corporate application I can see the win. For personal users accounts though, unless the provider was swamped there is no point for 99% of users and little use in going to expense for it.

[1] My IMAP service provider (fastmail.fm) supports the IDLE command and recommends setting the server to check every 28 minutes since they've set it to disconnect after 30 minutes of IDLE :
"You will get instant notifications of new mail since Thunderbird supports the IDLE command, however you should set this interval to just under 30 (say 28 for example) minutes since Fastmails IMAP server will disconnect you after 30 minutes with no activity. Checking for mail just prior to this timeout will prevent disconnections."

I've noticed that the IMAP IDLE mechanism doesn't work too well for devices that disconnect often. I suppose this would happen for connections that have a dynamic IP address, but it's particularly severe for mobile phones since the connection is lost very easily; and if, like me, you only use email over wifi, then the connection is lost even more easily. In this situation, I don't really want the email client to check for new email often; I really want it to check the connection to the IMAP server, and re-establish it, if it's been lost. I guess this might amount to the same thing, but in the end, I am finding that I *do* have to set my email client to check for email with a small period (every 5 minutes seems to be the smallest interval) just so that it keeps the connection alive....

It does seem like there is something to these push email systems after all :|